Crush those negative thoughts!

Have you heard of David D. Burns, a Stanford psychiatrist and author of the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy? Burns

explains the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for the lay person: that depression is caused by self-defeating beliefs and negative thoughts—thoughts like "I'm not good enough," "I'll never amount to anything," or "I have no friends." Feeling Good included exercises readers could use to change how they reacted to such thoughts and to stop depression before it spiraled down into an endless abyss of despair and pain. Study after study has since demonstrated CBT's effectiveness.

Now, however, Burns

currently draws from at least 15 schools of therapy, calling his methodology TEAM—for testing, empathy, agenda setting and methods. It's an approach he hopes will someday be as big a breakthrough as CBT was decades ago.

Testing means requiring that patients complete a short mood survey before and after each therapy session.

Without perfect empathy, he says, a therapist cannot help patients bring their resistance to change to a conscious level where it can be addressed. Burns urges therapists to have patients rate them for empathy on an evaluation form at the end of every session.

And the key to agenda setting is specificity: focusing on an upsetting incident or moment around which different methods can be tried.

Burns' methods are designed to crush negative thoughts. Read more about his methods here.